A short conversational transcript between Josh and Christopher Parsons discussing organizational risk when critical knowledge is held by a single person and how HR/recruitment might use a synthesis tool to surface and manage that risk. The focus is practical: using synthesis to understand single-person knowledge dependency and support knowledge transfer planning.
Well, maybe let's dig a little deeper on that. You know, we only have one guy who does this thing and he's about to retire.
Yeah.
Either way, you're at risk even if he's not about to retire.
Right.
How, how might practically, like the HR team recruitment use a tool like synthesis to help understand that better?
Yeah, so. So synthesis is an intranet. We're adding actually learning management capabilities into the platform as we speak. We just went into beta last week. It is a great technology for helping with knowledge management. However, knowledge management is about people, process technology, and culture. And I think I would start answering your question, not actually with our product, but like, with what process would look like. And I think some of what I alluded to a little bit with you and trying to figure out how you know how to do podcasts is where we would start. We did a project with a woman named Dorothy Leonard. She wrote a book called Critical Knowledge Transfer. It's awesome. I highly recommend everybody read it. She used to teach at Harvard Business School and mit, and we picked four of our clients to work with her over about six months to do exactly what you're saying. It's like find an expert. The knowledge is either at risk or whatever. They might be mid career, but like, you only have one of them and. And you'd like to do 10 projects a year or 20 projects of this type instead of only five because there's a bottleneck. And so we did a lot of different things to work through that, but the core, the core technique that worked over and over and over again is having them talk through project stories. And so, you know, they would go and talk about a project story or a challenge a time, a challenge they kind of like that they overcame or, you know, something that was really special about a project. And then you just keep asking detailed questions. It's like, pause. It's like behavioral interviewing. If you've ever been part of that, it's like, how did you make that decision? Oh, well, I kind of knew to do it because of xyz. Great. Like, what was the signal that was telling you that was the thing to do? Oh, well, actually, I have this little checklist on my desk that I use, you know, that says we look at this, then we look. It's like, perfect. All right. We just uncovered something. Like, these experts usually have tools either written down or in their head to help them heuristics, right. To help them make little choices. Or like the thing I asked you about, do you follow up or do you move on? There is intelligence that's buried inside you that figures out how to do those things. So a lot of it is interviewing these experts and taking them through real examples of what they work on and like pressing them when they made hard decisions or interesting decisions. That's where you kind of like start. And then once you make it visible to them, then they can go off to the race. It's just like, oh yeah, I have this whole thing, the whole philosophy on how this works. Nobody ever asks me about it, I've never talked about it, but like, I have a whole point of view on how this works. So it's really a lot like journalism more than it is about technology. From a technology perspective, then you can capture those things, you can make them videos, you can add them. In our platform, people can not only watch those interviews, but more to the point, search them. So we index all the transcripts and you can search right to that point. So if at some point in that interview they explain something about the way that they do this flashing detail and you have the same problem, you can search right to it. But more in the case of what we're talking about, I think about like really the interview, the people process part of that and then out of that, then you can distill knowledge assets. So maybe if I were like, let's just use an example, since we started there, maybe I could distill, after working with you for a couple hours, like Josh's interview guides or Josh's Best practices for interviewing, this is kind of the way that you prep, this is the way you do research on somebody. This is the way that you decide whether or not you're going to ask a follow up. There is stuff that you know that you don't know, that you know, that through working with a person who's not you, you can figure out. I hope that makes sense.
